Wednesday, 30 April 2014

Bob, one of Britain's best-loved character actors, has died at the age of 71 from the effects of pneumonia. Remembered for bringing a tough presence to his films, he himself had a tough London upbringing, received only limited education but left school at the age of 15, with a passion for language and literature instilled by his English teacher.What you possibly didn't know about Bob, that he :* was born outside London in 1942 in the third year of the Second World War in Bury St Edmunds, Suffok and then, from two weeks of age, was brought up in Finsbury Park, London, the son of Elsie, a cook, who instilled him with confidence and who, he later recalled : 'used to say to me, "If somebody doesn't like you, fuck 'em, they've got bad taste." ' and Robert, a clerk with the Pickford Removal Company and communist sympathiser. * remembered that : "Our flat was tiny. I had a put-you-up in the front room. We had a bath in the kitchen. The point is you didn't really know anything else; that's how life was. I looked around and all my mates were the same. It was a very skint area."* was hampered by his poorly understood dyslexia at school in the 1950s, written off as 'stupid' and after leaving at the age of 15 with one 'O' level exam, became a market porter in Covent Garden.

* said of his youth : "There was a lot of crime, of course, in the Forties and Fifties - robberies, old people getting mugged. There were gangs around Finsbury Park (right) and Haringey. They had knives and coshes and sticks. It was quite violent and it didn't take a lot to get into a fight. You just had to look the wrong way. We were all thugs. If I wasn't an actor I'd probably have been a serial killer or a burglar - something like that". * survived the beatings in street fights, a knife wound across the bridge of his nose which left him with a hollow between the eyes and being taken to meet the Kray Twins who ran London’s underworld in the 1950s. * later recalled that at the age of 25 in 1967, "trained to be an accountant and thought this is not for me, so I bummed around. I worked on a kibbutz in Israel and travelled the world" and in addition to banana picking on the kibbutz, worked as a camel-herder in Syria and a merchant seaman in the Norwegian Navy.* later claimed that he “fell sideways into acting by mistake” when, while waiting in a pub with a friend who wanted to audition for the Unity Theatre, was mistaken for the next candidate and recalled : “I was too pissed to argue, so I got on stage and acted my socks off ,” and as a result was offered the lead in 'The Feather Pluckers'.

* said : "I became a professional actor overnight and then I thought, I've got to learn to do this, because people are paying to see me. So I read the experts. I read Stanislavski and that seemed obvious; I read Lee Strasberg and that seemed like looking busy to impress everyone. And I found out that men are completely emotionally crippled - we can't express ourselves - so I started watching women. I became an actor by becoming a stalker."* after a year in repertory theatre, building up a reputation as an actor content to do anything, including fire-eating and running headlong at brick walls got his first major tv role was in 'On the Move' at the age of 34 in 1976, an educational series intended to tackle adult illiteracy, in which he played Alf, a removal man who, like him, had problems reading and writing.

* in the same year, came to wider attention in the original BBC version of Dennis Potter's drama 'Pennies from Heaven' as philandering 1930s sheet music salesman, Arthur Parker, who escapes from his dull life by fantasizing elaborately choreographed musical numbers in which he and the other characters lip-sync to original recording of popular 1930s music.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcCIVcmqFs8* was said by film critic Jason Solomons that "London ran through him like a stick of rock," and played a convincing and menacing gangster in 'The Long Good Friday' in 1980 and delivered a wordless screen masterpiece when he is picked up and taken to his execution by a IRA gunman, played by Pierce Brosnan in his first screen role.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVVrZJaN1IU* was angered by the fact that in the American version of his film his speeches were dubbed into stage Cockney because : “They thought the Yanks wouldn’t be able to understand me. In the film I end up sounding like Dick Van Dyke.”* won critical and box office acclaim at the National Theatre production of 'Guys and Dolls', where his charismatic performance carried him over any deficiencies in his singing and dancing of which he said : "The choreographer convinced me I looked like Fed Astaire, but really I looked like a little hippopotamus shaking his hooves."* found critics who described his 'animal appeal' began to compare him to Edward G.Robinson and George Raft and call him the 'Cockney Cagney' and in the 'Mona Lisa' in 1986, won their wider approval with a 'Cannes Award', 'Best Actor Golden Globe', 'Bafta Award' and 'Academy Award Nomination' for Best Actor.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdEOkAZlV3M

* in 1988 played Eddie Valiant, who investigates a murder involving the famous cartoon character, 'Roger Rabbit'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAnNvnViJpo and got into his character by studying the way his daughter played with her toys.

* in 2012 had announced his retirement from acting due to his on going battle with Parkinson's disease.

* kept his cockney wit and self-deprecating humour and once said : "I'm just a short fat bald guy who got lucky. Where's the glamour?"His daughter Rosa has published a moving tribute to her Dad with the 11 lessons he taught her about life :'My darling Dad has died. I loved him to the ends of the earth and he loved me back just the same. These are the lessons he taught me, I will keep them close to my heart and remind myself of them whenever I stumble or falter.'

Sunday, 27 April 2014

Alan who has his work in permanent collections in the V&A, the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Museum of Canada and the Berlin National Gallery is 88 years old today and remains a little known artist whose reputation stands higher in France and Germany than it does in Britain. Neglected by the English art establishment, he stuck to his guns after turning his back on landscape painting and continued to produce a meticulous body of drawn and constructed abstract art in black and white, shadow and light.

What you possibly didn't know about Alan, that he :

* was born in the year of the General Strike in 1926, in Newmarket in Suffolk where his father, who had Scottish blood, worked as a stableman and his mother was from Suffolk stock and taught himself to paint after leaving school at the age of 14.

* during the Second World War, at the age of 18 in 1944, served with the Suffolk Regiment and the Highland Light Infantry in France, Belgium, Holland and Germany and later said : ‘When the war finished, my division was broken up. We were all sent off to different places and I finished up training as an army schoolmaster and eventually settled in Hanover for about a year and a half.’ where he first encountered Paul Klee and avant-garde art which was 'the most important experience I had, I would think.’

* was demobilised from the Army in 1947 and later said : "I was on a high over what I’d seen in Germany but I didn’t understand the philosophy. I call it that but for an artist to have an aesthetic philosophy is poisonous in this country — you can get shot for that. When I came back here I was totally baffled by the more sophisticated art circles in London. It was such a gloomy sort of set-up, partly as a result of the War, I suppose, an indrawn nationalism. You can understand it: the country had been through a hell of a time and it had been cut off culturally, no question of that."

* at the age of 22 in 1948, began his studies at the Woolwich Polytechnic in London and although originally a figurative painter, tended increasingly towards abstraction after his contact with the work of Klee and continued his studies between the ages of 26 -27 at the Royal College of Art.

* remembered the first Skira art books coming out when he was a student where there had been none before and was critical of post-War English provincialism : "The art world or art groups in Europe are much more open and accessible and always have been, than in this country. France and Germany are big countries, and Germany especially has centres of excellence everywhere — a legacy of the old princedoms. It’s not all centred on one place, like London, and it stops this dictatorship — the rule of the arbiters of taste that we have here.’

* while still a student, had a one-man exhibition at the Redfern Gallery 1952, where his distinctive silhouetted style, in which dark linear forms stood out against luminous backgrounds, caught on at once and later said this early success was "embarrassing", though the financial rewards were "welcome".

* said in his introduction to his Redfern Gallery Exhibition catalogue in the Spring of 1953 : 'Poetry is never absent from Nature, but alone it cannot constitute a work of art. It must be reconciled with the elements of design and composition. Laying emphasis on the formal values in a work will therefore result in a degree of abstraction. This is, to me, the logical development of the motif towards its transformation into a picture.'

* emerged from the Royal College of Art 'fêted', as Bryan Robertson (right) wrote, as 'the golden boy of post neo-romanticism in England with his engagement with landscape, from his native Suffolk to the hop gardens and orchards of his adoptive Kent, inspired in part by Constable and Paul Nash but also Klee and increasingly by Mondrian.

* taught at the Central School of Art and Design from 1954 - 61 and had a one man exhibition in New York at Durlacher Bros in 1954 and was one of the three international prize-winners in the Giovani Pittoria Exhibition in Rome in 1955 and started to move his paintings towards abstraction in 1958 and thus abandoned a lucrative career as a landscape painter saying : "I’ve been a European since the war finished. I think of myself first as a European and an Anglo–Scot after that."

* later said that he knew his art had to develop : "I was after something else, I had something ticking away inside me. I was lucky enough to read some things by Herbert Read, particularly his Faber book on Klee, and it was just like getting a pat on the back. It was marvellous — I thought, 'This man’s been there'. Read was a great scholar and an extraordinary man and he was British! I only met him twice but he gave me a lot of support."

* said : "What I really got from Klee was an aesthetic philosophy. He was a wonderfully accomplished musician — first violin for the Bern chamber orchestra, for a start — and he brought something of the insight of music into statements he made on visual art. He was incredibly articulate and also into metaphysics and that again is a German trait" and on another occasion : "I’ve been a European since the war finished. I think of myself first as a European and an Anglo–Scot after that."

* moved to teach at Saint Martin's School of Art and in 1967 at the age of 31 and abandoning painting entirely to make only white reliefs, tonal drawings and woodcuts, never again enjoyed the same degree of commercial success he'd had in the 1950s and continued to teach until he retired at the age of 64 in 1990.

Friday, 25 April 2014

Richard, who produced and script-edited some of the most significant and politically controversial television dramas in the last century has died at the age of 70.

What you possibly didn't know about Richard, that he :

* was born in Marylebone, London during the Second World War in the winter of 1943, into a Norfolk 'county' family with a penchant for amateur dramatics and from the age of 11, educated at Eton Boys' Public School until he left at the age of 17 in 1960.

* got his first job at the age of 18 in 1961 at Frank Hauser's Oxford Playhouse and his second at the Chichester Festival Theatre under Laurence Olivier at a time when he was working with Joan Plowright, Michael Redgrave, Sybil Thorndike, André Morell, Lewis Casson, Joan Greenwood, John Necville and Keith Michell and kept as a 'treasured possession' the 1962 programme of 'Uncle Vanya', signed by them all.

* next, after a short stint in London on the Lionel Bart musical, 'Blitz!', decided the world of theatre was precarious and joined the BBC as a trainee and in his twenties, worked on a wide range of programmes from the cult drama series, 'Adam Adamant Lives!'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V96-kvbZwQk to a forerunner of Top of the Pops.

* experienced a life changing accident when in 1970 at the age of 27, while driving up the A1 near Sandy in Bedfordshire, veered off the road, hit a bank and thrown forward without a seat belt, suffered multiple trauma, broke his spine and was treated at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

* determined not to allow his confinement to a wheelchair restrict his work, returned to the BBC in 1971, became a researcher on the Dennis Potter serial, 'Casanova' and then, after being steered into script editing, worked on 'Thirty-Minute Theatre' and made his first of four productions in 1973 in the Centre Play Series with 'Places Where They Sing' starring Gordon Jackson.

* got his big break at the age of 38 in 1981 with his first major drama, the eight part serial, 'Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years' starring Robert Hardy with Siân Phillips, Nigel Havers, Tim Pigott-Smith, Peter Barkworth and Eric Porter, on which he worked for two years and later said : “I am still very proud of that, it was a landmark for me.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nT4t33gLeA

* in 1985, made a rare excursion into screenwriting, when he adapted Graham Greene’s last novel, 'Dr Fischer of Geneva' to provide James Mason with his final film role, as the titular misanthropic tycoon who had the unusual hobby - to expose human greed and see how much humiliation his fellow men endure enticed by valuable presents?

* courted controversy in a production of a study in deception with Paul McGann as Percy Toplis, a deserter in the First World War in a tv series, 'The Monocled Mutineer', written by Alan Bleasdale, screened as a 'real life story'.

* caused furore amongst critics, politicians and military historians with Norman Tebbit, then the Chairman of the Conservative Party, declaring that the drama was further evidence of a Left-wing bias in the BBC with Richard forced to defend the 'examples of dramatic licence' incorporated into the script but also seeing the series win 'Best Single Drama' in the Bafta Awards.

* produced a more recent conflict with 'Tumbledown' a BBC film about the Falklands War starring Colin Firth as Robert Lawrence, MC, a real-life Scots Guards officer, left partially paralysed after the Battle of Mount Tumbledown.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWUCPLYgXXo

* courted controversy again by showing the apathy by Government and Army officials to those wounded in the War and whose objective, was according to director, Richard Eyre, to be “deeply political”, denied by Richard saying : “Tumbledown is not meant to be a documentary. It’s a play acted by actors” and once again seeing it gain a Bafta Award for 'Best Single Drama'.

* in 1991, with Director John Schlesinger, was executive producer of the award winning, 'A Question of Attribution', based on Alan Bennett's stage play about another study in deception, the Russian spy and 'Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures', Sir Anthony Blunt played by James Fox, with Prunella Scales as the Queen.

* Three years later, collaborated again with John for a television take on Stella Gibbons’s novel 'Cold Comfort Farm', scripted by Malcolm Bradbury and starring Ian McKellen and Eileen Atkins and during the rest of the Nineties and into the Noughties continued to work on single dramas and popular series, including 'Where the Heart Is', 'The Murder Room' and 'Messiah: The Rapture'.

* campaigned fiercely for better wheelchair access in theatres and supported efforts to improve the portrayal of disabled people on television, citing 'Ironside', the American detective in a wheelchair played by Raymond Burr, as the most positive role model and said in 1995 : "The Americans are years ahead of us on this A disabled character was at the centre of a popular entertainment without making a great issue of it."

* took his Christian Faith seriously, was an active member of St Michael and All Angels Church in Chiswick, West London, read the lesson, competed fiercely on quiz nights and suggested fundraising ideas for a new organ which will provide the accompaniment for his memorial service on 1 May.

* once said :"I never set out to make controversial drama and I would fall flat on my face if I did so," but according to friends, relished the controversy and loved it when the Daily Mail attacked one of his.

Tuesday, 22 April 2014

George, a radio, film and tv actor, whose career has spanned 70 years and who I remember when I was a boy in the pre-tv 1950s, playing an amiable, bumbling bachelor with his dog Psyche,in his radio radio comedy, 'A Life of Bliss', is 89 years old today.

What you possibly didn't know about George, that he :

* was born in London in 1927 and was given up for adoption at the age of ten days and taken by the 'Cole family', a fact he found out about by accident some years later.

* left school to be a butcher's boy, but landed a part in a touring musical and chose acting as a career and appeared on the stage and then in the film, 'Cottage to Let', as a Second World War cockney evacuee, at the age of 14 in 1941.

* was taken in, along with his mother, during the London Blitz, by stage and film actor, Alistair Sim and his wife at the age of 15, who helped him lose his London cockney accent and who became his mentor, going on to make 11 films with him.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_IMf0vpl0

* appeared opposite Laurence Olivier in 'The Demi-Paradise' in 1943 and in his film version of 'Henry V' in 1944 then had his career interrupted by service in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War in 1944 until 1947

* at the age of 26 in 1953, starred with Petula Clark as awkward, absent-minded bachelor, David Bliss, in a new radio sitcom, 'A Life of Bliss' which ran for 118 episodes before transferring to tv in the early 1960s.https://archive.org/details/ALifeOfBlissBbc

* played Henry Root in the series 'Root Into Europe' in 1992.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alhSY8hAhlw and from 1995-96 starred as businessman-councillor, Freddie Patterson, in 'An Independent Man', in which his wife Penny Morrell also appeared and as Brian Hook in the BBC Comedy, 'Dad' in the late 1990s.

* starred in the mid-1990s ITV comedy series 'My Good Friend', playing a mischievous pensioner, and in 2003 at the age of 76 appeared alongside (right) Timothy Spall and Annette Crosbie in the drama 'Bodily Harm.'

* in 2007, at the age of 80, appeared in the BBC drama 'A Class Apart', in which he played a grandfather who encourages his impoverished daughter to keep her son on the straight and narrow by means of a public school bursary.

* plays a character called Cyril and starts filming in a low budget horror film this summer, 'Road Rage', due to be released in 2015.

So it's "thanks George", for helping to keep us entertained from 1943 - 2014 and here's to the next seventy years !

Saturday, 19 April 2014

Wallace, who argued that company branding was much more than messaging and cosmetics but also culture, how the people behind the brand were organised and how they behaved, has died at the age of 83.

* born in London six years before the outbreak of the Second World War, the son of Rachel Muscovitch and Alfred Olins, themselves both born in London in 1896 whose parents had escaped to Britain from Russian pogroms against the Jews in the 1880's.

* was provided for by his father who developed a family road transport business and was looked after by a nanny in a home which was a 'cheerless establishment' and attended a Jewish kindergarten attached to the Synagogue where he remembered learning about the British Empire.

* remembered family trips to Clacton and pre-War Paris and was briefly evacuated to an emergency school in Brighton in 1939 at the start of the German blitz bombing of London, then packed off to the Perse Boarding School (left) aged nine, possibly because of his mother's mental health problems which were having an impact on him, his parents' marriage and the family in general.

* went on to Highgate School, an independent school for boys, at the age of 13 in 1943, where Gerard Hoffnung and Anthony Howard were older boys, excelled in running and was left with an attachment to deference and hierarchy which stayed with him into early adulthood.

* despite feeling 'mismatched' to school, left to study History at St Peter's College, Oxford in 1948 and after graduating in the early 1950s, did National Service in the Army in Germany serving in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers followed by a commission in a tank regiment and had his first 'relationship' with the opposite sex with a German girl.

- early discomfort with class consciousness in Britain.
- conflict with and early alienation from Christian and Jewish religion and the effect this has had on his children
- 'recognition of insider/outsider issues and their relationship to his drives and ambitions' prompted when his father persuaded him to become a freemason.
- thoughts about the culture of Jewishness.- remembered how Jews fleeing to Palestine from Europe in the late 1940s reflected in anti-Semitism in Britain at the time.

. * left the Army and his experience of an attempted homosexual rape by an officer behind him and got his first job with the London advertising agency, S.H.Benson in 1957, soon after his marriage to Renate Steinert, who he'd met at Oxford and got an overseas posting, to Bombay, where after visiting three steel companies it became clear to him "that there must be some way of underlining a difference between an organisation apart from the way that it promotes itself – a way to communicate its personality that’s the experience that drew me towards corporate identity."

* returned to Britain in the early 60s and was dissatisfied with work in the advertising officer corps which he found "very superficial and cosmetic" and "didn't get to the heart of anything", until he met designer, Michael Wolff, who he once described "the most brilliant creative brain I ever met, and the most maddening human being" and with whom he started their brand consultancy, Wolff Olins, at the age of 35 in 1965. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oPOfTe8ZhM

* worked with Michael for eighteen years, finding at first they “very much at the fringes, a bit like vegetarianism”, resented by traditional admen and misunderstood by the corporate world, before developing their poster organisation and stalking horse of the 'big brand movement' which became the market leader in its field.

* from his first customer, Hadfield Paints, moved from designing identities for corporations in need of help projecting themselves to the outside world, to bigger companies with multiple subsidiaries, each of with its own identity, behaviour and relationship with the mother and became involved with what subsequently became known as ‘brand architecture’.

* had a client list which included British Oxygen, Norton Motorcycles, Bovis Construction, P&O, London Weekend Television, the Metropolitan Police, the Beatles' company, Apple, British Oxygen, Cunard, English Electric, British Telecom, 3i, Renault, Volkswagen and Lloyd’s of London and also countries, regions and cities.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta9Es6MNrbI

* said "one of the worst company names in the world is Volkswagen. it’s associated with the Third Reich and it’s difficult for anyone to pronounce correctly who cannot speak German – yet somehow 'VW' works. through decades of creative, intelligent communications and good products they have overcome their difficult to say and stigmatized name."* was responsible for persuading British Telecom in 1991, at an estimated cost of £50 million, to rebrand itself as BT and to adopt the logo of the 'prancing piper.'

* in his first book, 'The Corporate Personality: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Corporate Identity' in 1978, set out his arguments for the primacy of brand thinking for an audience beyond the boardroom and conference platform and captured interest with jargon-free language and by ranging from the symbolism of Ancient World armies to culture contrasts in status-markers in Africa and suburban America.

* once said of the man behind the bow tie, thick-rimmed spectacles, bright check shirts who, apparently, did not consciously brand himself : "I am what I am. I am outspoken and abrasive. I can be difficult. It is what I am like. I do not try to cultivate it but I do not hide it either. I tell people what I think and I do not mince anything. It is what people pay for."

* in 2001 at the age of 70, used his skills to persuade the American advertising giant Omnicom to buy his Wolff Olins consultancy for £30 million and three years after that in his 2004 book, 'Wally Olins – On Brand' reflected that : 'Branding has moved so far beyond its commercial origins that its impact is virtually immeasurable in social and cultural terms. It has spread into education, sport, fashion, travel, art, theatre, literature, the region, the nation and virtually anywhere else you can think of.'

Was said by Mark Damazar, Master of St. Peter's College :

'He was the youngest octogenarian I had met. He was relentlessly curious about buildings, objects, but above all people. He loved talking to anyone of any generation and when he reflected on the past, he did so shorn of any "good old days" rhetoric. He was a great performer too. When he came to give a talk at the college, the room was packed with business students of many nationalities who lapped up his observations on design and branding and bathed him in admiration and affection.'

'Bathed in admiration and affection', what better epitaph might an old man have ?

P.S. I have this image of Wally, a Jewish boy whose Grandmother who lived with the family in London and was a Russian refugee from persecution against the Jews in the riots or pogroms against them in the 1880s, attending a prep school in Cambridge and boys' public school in North London the 1930s and 40s and surrounded by a sea of English faces. He later said that he felt 'mismatched' to school, yet I think that from an early age he had a clear idea of who he was and his own 'identity'.

* was born during the Second World War in 1941 on the Singlijan Tea Plantation in Assam in British India which was managed by her father who separated from her mother when she was a child.

* back in England, from the age if six, was brought up by a foster-mother and studied as a boarder at the independent 'Convent of Our Lady School' in St. Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex, from which she was later expelled for telling a risqué joke which reached a wider audience than originally anticipated.

* at Wycombe Court School, played the role of the 'Dauphin' in George Bernard Shaw's 'Saint Joan' and after leaving, studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama before her part in Andromeda.

I believed for many years that the lyrics :Terry meets Julie,Waterloo Station,every friday night
alluded to an affair between Julie and Terrence until Ray Davies denied this in his autobiography and claimed in a 2008 interview, "It was a fantasy about my sister going off with her boyfriend to a new world and they were going to emigrate and go to another country."